23.3.09

After my lovely solo lunch at the quiet Hereford Road, I felt confident and excited about my lunch reservation the next day, at Bocca di Lupo, an Italian restaurant in Soho.

I had a reservation at 14:30, which you can hardly call lunch, but it was the only slot available at the time of my booking. I´d spent the morning at Borough Market (more on that later) and I had sampled so many little things there, that even at 14:30 I wasn´t really hungry. Again, this influenced my choice of dishes - had I dined here at night, dishes like fried eel with polenta or pork & foie gras sausage with farro and porcini would undoubtedly have called my name - but as it was, I had to stick to salads and light dishes.

I arrived in a very crowded and busy restaurant, with people leaning against the wall sipping Prosecco while waiting to be seated. My barstool was waiting for me though, and I have to say that when dining alone, there is no better place to sit than the counter. I had a full view of the small kitchen, as well as of the bar, and even if I´d had nothing but wine and a grilled cheese sandwich for lunch I´d still would have had a great time. It was so much fun watching the kitchen at work - the big burly guy manning the grill station, the quick little guy responsible for the pasta, the guy who I presumed was in charge yelling out orders and directions. Watching the interplay between waitstaff and chefs was also very entertaining.

Truffle oil can be so disappointing, but here it worked really well - the radishes were peppery, the celeriac sweet, the pomegranites tangy, the cheese pungent and salty, and the truffle oil melded it all together. A very nice and ´healthy´feeling little dish.

blood oranges with fennel and mullet bottarga

I have to confess I only chose this because I´d never tasted bottarga before and I was really curious about it. This was an excellent salad, and I loved the bottarga - grainy and salty and only slightly fishy. But, all in all, this was perhaps too similar to my other starter (everything was, perhaps, a bit too crunchy).

veal and pork agnolotti with meat sauce

A simple and comfortable dish, expertly done - agnolotti fluffy and light, with a sweet meaty filling, the sauce light and very flavorful.

burnt almond granita with bitter chocolate sorbet

The chocolate sorbet (dairy free) was divine, the almond granita was quite boring. I ate all the chocloate sorbet and even the bartender told me that the sorbet was ´the best part´ - I think they should just serve the chocolate sorbet, and everybody would be happy!

This is regional Italian food: the menu lists where every dish comes from - blood orange granita from Sicily, fried salt cod from Lazio - and I think that´s a wonderful way to become better aquainted with the variety of cooking styles that exists throughout Italy. I had a delightful lunch. And if I wasn´t really wowed by the food, I blame that more on the way I ordered, than on the restaurant. I´d love to go back for dinner and order some of the interesting fried dishes and meats that are on the menu!

18.3.09

Anyone who’s ever dined in a restaurant alone, knows that there’s a very fine line between feeling strong, confident and happy, and pathetically wall-flowerish. And it doesn’t take much to tip the balance. The way you are greeted when you walk in, the amount of time you have to wait before someone comes to take your drink order. Or, discovering you´re the only one in the room wearing jeans. Some things can be planned or researched, but for a large part, you'll just have to take your chances and hope that the solo dining gods are smiling down on on you and that your carefully planned lunch or dinner for 1 will work out well.

I haven’t dined solo that much, but still often enough to have had some bad experiences, awkward moments and feeling-very-sorry-for myself times. But when I was researching my London trip, I knew that the chances of eating well would be very small if I tagged along with the group for 3 days – so I decided to book myself 2 solo lunches at places that appealed to me and me alone.

It was hard to choose between St John and Hereford Road (who share a similar cooking style – no surprise if you know that Tom Pemberton, chef at Hereford Road, used to work with Fergus Henderson at St John). But as I kept going back to the Hereford Road website, I noticed that the menu changed a couple of times a week. And every time I looked, there wasn’t a single thing on the menu that I did NOT want to eat.

So on Friday, fresh out of the Eurostar, I took the tube across town and arrived at Hereford Road just in time for my 12:30 booking.

The small kitchen is located right at the entrance of the restaurant, and opposite the kitchen is a narrow area with little banquettes that each seat 2 people. The restaurant was pretty empty (and stayed that way all the through lunch service, unfortunately) which means I also could have sat in the larger dining room, but I chose one of the little two-seaters instead so I could both watch out the window and watch the chefs.

Sadly, my menu choice was mainly guided by the fact that I was not really very hungry (and I never eat a large meal at lunchtime).

Salad of roasted Jerusalem artichoke, watercress and onion:

The Jerusalem artichokes were lukewarm and beautifully tender. The red onions were cooked (which was a good thing - I don+t like raw onions), and I think they were slightly pickled. Artichokes and onions were tossed with the green leaves in a creamy, mustardy vinaigrette. A very simple dish, but really good.

Next up was hake with fennel and green sauce. The hake was grilled to absolute perfection: cooked through but so moist and tender. The fennel was soft and sweet, and fish and vegetable were balanced by the salty, earthy green sauce that was spooned on top. Again, a really simple dish but so perfectly executed that it was a joy to eat.

I had already spotted the rhubarb dessert and there was no way I was going to pass that up. The rhubarb jelly was light and sweet with a hint of ginger, the rhubarb compote nice and tangy, the sorbet had a great rhubarb flavor. And while the sorbet had a little too many ice crystals, this was still a dreamy dessert for a rhubarb lover like myself: the cool slippery jelly, the cold sorbet, the room temperature creamy compote. I think I was smiling the whole time I was eating it.

I seriously considered getting the rhubarb Eton mess they had on the menu as a second dessert, but decided that would be too much.. really.

I had two glasses of a very nice white (Vermentino) with my lunch, and was floating on a little cloud of happiness as I spent the rest of the afternoon in Notting Hill - consequently spending way too much money at the Spice Shop and Books for Cooks (whatever am I going to do with that riduculously expensive jar of Grains of Paradise?)

But it was a good day, with the balance definitely tipped towards pleasure.. for one.

My London weekend was filled to the brim with gorgeous food and lovely restaurants. I had 2 truly great lunches on my own (more abut those later), but, after all, this was a group trip, and I had planned one dinner for all 14 of us to eat together. Arranging this wasn’t easy (especially because I only started thinking about it one week in advance), but someone on Chowhound directed me to Konstam – a place I never would have found on my own, no matter how long I’d googled. The menu looked interesting, it was within walking distance of our hotel, the owner was extremely friendly and cooperative when I called – so Konstam it was.

The room is gorgeous and very unusual, with huge, beaded light fixtures hanging from the ceiling, and turqouise floors and walls - creating an almost submarine-like atmosphere. You can see a picture of the dining room here – all my pics of the interior came out blurry. I feel it took the servers some time to warm up to us but when they did, they were great – and I know that a large group is not an easy thing to handle on a busy Saturday night!

They had suggested putting us in the private dining room, but I thought that would be a bit boring, so we had 2 separate tables in the main dining room instead – which worked perfectly. With a group that size one large table doesn’t make much sense anyway, since there’s no way you’ll be able to communicate with everyone, so having 2 tables (and switching seats sometime during the evening) is a much better way to go.

Konstam’s food philosophy is interesting and unusual – from their website: "over 85 % of the produce used in the Konstam kitchen is grown or reared within the area covered by the London Underground network". This could easily turn into a gimmick, but in the hands of owner and chef Oliver Rowe, it doesn’t. When you look at the menu you see locally raised pork, chicken and lamb, seasonal vegetables like chard, kale, turnips, beetroot and parsnips. Because of the localness and seasonality, the food has a decidedly Northern European feel – lots of things like sour cream, dill and caraway, spätzle, pierogi’s and pies - but it´s not heavy or stodgy, and very far away from the blandness that´s still too often associated with British food.

We had a limited menu to choose from, which is the downside of group dining – it meant I couldn’t order the Mersey dab with nasturtium butter, or the rosehip sorbet –but really there wasn’t much to complain about the things I did eat: Pigeon breast wrapped in home cured bacon with beetroot salad

Pan-fried lemon some with mushroom clam sauce and sprouting broccoli

The pigeon was delicious – the meat was extremely rare but so mellow and tender, a great combination with the salty bacon and the sweet earthy beetroot (btw, another excellent example of how well beetroot and bacon go together). I tasted some of the house smoked mackerel and the Jerusalem artichoke soup, and they were both very good.

The pork was exceptional – maybe the juiciest and most flavorful pork I ever had, and the glazed turnips were also delicious – they made want to go to the market and buy turnips, which isn’t a feeling I often have. My sole was good, maybe not as exciting as the pork, but because I had had eaten such a big lunch, I was still glad I chose it – the flavors were light and fresh.

Lemon posset with gooseberries was delightful and so British, and the selection of British cheeses was the perfect way to end the meal.

As a rule, I’m not a fan of group dining – I tend to lose myself in conversations and mingling, and then obsess about not doing the food justice. When the food is really good I feel I won’t be able to appreciate it, yet it has to be good enough to be able to stand up to the literal and figurative noise of the crowd. The food at Konstam did exactly that: you get excellent produce prepared with respect and care, nothing fussy or too fancy, just great flavors and interesting flavor combinations.

They have a nice wine list, but our adventurousness led us to trying a British white, and we ended up ordering a lot of bottles of it. As I’m looking at the drinks menu online, I regret not getting the 10 year old Somerset Apple cider brandy... maybe next time?

16.3.09

I don´t know how it happened, but London kind of fell off my radar. The last time I was there, I went for 24 hours solely to see my beloved Patty Griffin in concert - and that was exciting, and I had a great time, but to be honest those 24 hours could have passed anywhere as long as Patty was singing for 2 of them.

I love England and anything British almost as passionately as I love America. It´s a very different kind of love, and it would take me a long time and a lot of words to try and describe exactly how these loves are to be compared. For now, let me just say that the sight of an English landscape, the picture of an English village, makes my heart sing in a way that no Tuscan hill or Alpine rock can achieve. There´s something about it that suits me, that speaks to me in a way no other country does.

Why had it been so long since I visited? The psychological barrier of the sea that divides us - no longer true, now that the Eurostar zaps you to London in a little over 5 hours. And oh, yes, it´s so terribly expensive. Except it isn´t, at least not right now.

I was in London this weekend for 3 glorious days and I had some of the best food I´d had in months, met some of the nicest people, had some of the best serveice, went to what may be the best food market period . And all the while, I was wondering why it had been so long, and all the time, I was plotting how I can go back as soon as possible.